Twitter’s new strategy to moderate comments in Periscope

Twitter, the company that owns Periscope, has announced a new tool to fight internet bullies, spam and abusive comments on their broadcast platform. Users will now be able to report abusive comments with the help of other Periscope users.

Periscope is a live video streaming application, currently available for iOS and Android Users. The broadcast application was developed by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein and was later bought by Twitter inc that launched it in 2015.

The application was born thanks to an envisioning of developer Kayvon Beykpour, who was traveling in Istanbul while a series of protests exploded on the country.

Twitter, the company that owns Periscope, has announced a new tool to fight internet bullies, spam and abusive comments on their broadcast platform. Photo credit: Mixtrategy

Beykpour searched the events on Twitter but wasn’t able to see what was happening, so he started developing an application that was going to allow users to transport to the scenes and be able to see what happens through video streaming. The team of developers obtained $1.5 million to create de app from different organizations that included Google and Stanford.

Twitter obtained the company in 2015 and the application was launched on March 26 and released on Android on May 26. Rumors assure the acquisition cost the company from $75 million to $100 million.

Innovating Periscope

The application allows any user to broadcast an event, wich also allows the interactions from viewing users with comments on the live video. The main objective of the app is to provide a transparent message to the global community.

Since a live broadcast can be watched by any person around the globe, reports of spam and abusive comments have alerted company owners to work on the issue.

Even Twitter’s CEO has experienced the downside of broadcast videos at the Twitter annual meeting when he was zapping through different periscopes and found a male exhibitionist. Several other reports have been made, especially from women who have felt harassment from anonymous users.

Periscope users will now be able to report comments they find inappropriate with the help of a randomly selected group of viewers that will vote to estimate whether the comments are in fact abusive or not. In the case a comment is found inappropriate, the user who commented will be disabled from the broadcast.

The tool can be accessed by users by simply tapping on a comment emitted on a broadcast. Regardless of the jury’s decision on the comment, the person who reported the abuse won’t be able to see any more comments from the reported person.

“We want our community to feelcomfortablee when broadcasting. One of the unique things about periscope is that you’re often interacting with people you don’t know; that immediate intimacy is what makes it such a captivating experience. But that intimacy can also be a vulnerability if strangers post abusive comments, we’ve created a transparent tool that allows the collective actions of viewers to help,” said Periscope’s creator and CEO Kayvon Beykpur.

This innovation will allow users to feel safer when making broadcast videos on the website and hopefully will lower the amount of harassment on the app.